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Assessing Sediment Pulse during an Extreme Hydrological Event in the Alaknanda Basin, Northwestern Himalaya, India

  • Research Articles
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Journal of the Geological Society of India

Abstract

In the year 2013, the Northwestern Himalaya witnessed an extreme hydrological event that severely affected the upper Ganga Basin. The unexpected high sediment mobilisation in the basin affected the human population, infrastructure, and ecology in several reaches of the Ganga river and its tributaries. In an exceedingly affected reach, the Kedarnath valley, a considerable sediment volume (∼26243 × 104 m3) was mobilised during the 2013 extreme hydrological event. In the Srinagar valley, up to 50 × 104 m3 of legacy sediment was washed away during the same event. This sediment mobilisation generated sediment pulses in the affected region, which is assessed through remote sensing, field observations and existing literature, in the Kedarnath and Srinagar valleys. Results show that the evolution of translative, dispersive, and their combined sediment pulse pattern in both selected reaches of the upper Ganga Basin. The mountainous region of the upper Ganga basin has very few monitoring stations observing sediment movement, and data from such stations are mostly unavailable due to which our understanding of the sediment movement in the Himalaya remains very poor. Therefore, it is suggested that there is a need for detailed studies of the sediment transport mechanism in the Himalayan river basins especially during such extreme hydrological events when large volume of sediment is mobilised.

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Acknowledgment

Rahul Devrani thanks SERB, India, for granting Postdoctoral Fellowship — PDF/2016/003590. RD and MM are grateful to the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun, for providing facilities to carry out the present work. We are also thankful to anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, 33 G.M.S. Road, Dehradun, 248 001, India

    Rahul Devrani & Manish Mehta

  2. Department of Geology, Chhatra Marg, University of Delhi, Delhi, 110 007, India

    Vimal Singh

  3. School of Environmental Science, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 110 067, India

    Rahul Devrani & A. L. Ramanathan

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  1. Rahul Devrani
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Devrani, R., Singh, V., Mehta, M. et al. Assessing Sediment Pulse during an Extreme Hydrological Event in the Alaknanda Basin, Northwestern Himalaya, India. J Geol Soc India 97, 48–54 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12594-021-1624-3

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